ALL ABOUT CHRISTMAS EVE | Ryan Landry and the Gold Dust Orphans pin some tinsel on the Oscar-winning 1950 Joseph L. Mankiewicz film All About Eve, with Landry hamming it up as Bette Davis's Margo Channing, her coiffure a shoulder-length halo of auburn curls, her painted lips a permanent twist approximating the actress's signature sneer. The show is set in Boston, and Channing is appearing not in an ante-bellum melodrama but in a holiday travesty titled Party on the Pole that enables both Landry and Penny Champayne (as Eve Harrington) to appear in fur bikinis accessorized by reindeer antlers. Apart from the disco-choreographed sacrilege that is the award-winning Harrington vehicle No, No, Nativity (itself worth the price of admission), there are few surprises in this gaily bedecked parody, most of which is lifted straight from the movie and sent to winter camp. But the show is as puerile and lively as most Orphans fare, and Landry, in pushing Davis's Channing over the top, proves this is territory in which measurement is exponential. | Machine, 1254 Boylston St, Boston |www.brownpapertickets.com| Through December 27 | Curtain 8 pm Fri-Sat | 5 pm Sun | $35-$45

BEST OF BOTH WORLDS | The American Repertory Theater makes its first Loeb Drama Center appearance of the season with this holiday musical with book and lyrics by Randy Weiner and music by Obie winner Diedre Murray. Part of new ART artistic director Diane Paulus's "Shakespeare" season, it got a thumbs-up from the New York Times— "This rousing musical has taken the plot from The Winter's Tale, tossed out anything resembling Shakespearean language, and achieved a hypnotic effect with musical numbers that leave the audience whooping" — so never mind that the language is the best part of any Shakespeare play and just enjoy the R&B and gospel treats, which are legion. The cast includes Gregg Baker, Mary Bond Davis, and Jeanette Bayardelle; Paulus herself directs. | Loeb Drama Center, 64 Brattle St, Cambridge | 617.547.8300 | Through January 3 | Curtain 7:30 pm Tues-Wed | 2 pm [December 31] + 7:30 pm [no Christmas Eve] Thurs | 8 pm [no Christmas Day] Fri | 2 + 8 pm Sat | 2 + 7:30 pm [no evening January 3] Sun | $25-$75; $15-$65 seniors; $20 student rush

Joyful noise From the clamorous arrival of some ghetto hot wheels to a scorching gospel finale, Best of Both Worlds warms up The Winter's Tale . The third entry in American Repertory Theater's Shakespeare Exploded! Festival, this sizzling and soulful gloss on the Bard's late romance mines Shakespeare's time- and realm-hopping fairy tale.

LIGHT WAVES: BOSTON BALLET'S ''ALL KYLIÁN'' | March 13, 2013 A dead tree hanging upside down overhead, with a spotlight slowly circling it. A piano on stilts on one side of the stage, an ice sculpture's worth of bubble wrap on the other.

HANDEL AND HAYDN'S PURCELL | February 04, 2013 Set, rather confusingly, in Mexico and Peru, the 1695 semi-opera The Indian Queen is as contorted in its plot as any real opera.

REVIEW: MAHLER ON THE COUCH | November 27, 2012 Mahler on the Couch , from the father-and-son directing team of Percy and Felix Adlon, offers some creative speculation, with flashbacks detailing the crisis points of the marriage and snatches from the anguished first movement of Mahler's unfinished Tenth Symphony.